Polestar 5 road test: Great but too late
Tug on the motorised door release flap, duck your head under the low-ish cant rail, squeeze yourself past the B-pillar and through the slightly snug door aperture, and drop your bum onto the low cushion: you will find there’s plenty of room in either the front and back, even if you’re a large adult (which you wouldn’t quite say about the Taycan).
While the low beltline and dashboard certainly make it
feel as if you could be sat just a little lower at the wheel, there’s plenty of appealing dynamic purpose about the driving position. Good support and adjustability on offer from the sports front seats, too.
However, fully adjusting them and then putting the steering column just where you want it takes longer than it should, because of Polestar’s well-established preference for fitting only one physical knob or button where two or three would be more useful – or none at all and making you resort to prodding and swiping away at the central infotainment touchscreen, making what should be a quick and easy process unnecessarily fussy.
If there is a happy compromise between actual ease of use and the ideological removal of ‘superfluous’ physical controls, Polestar passed it several years ago – and now needs to retrace its steps. Door mirrors, headlights and ADAS should have fixed physical controls that can be found quickly and easily, because these aren’t ‘set and forget’ things. Other secondary controls should be illuminated and clearly marked, so you that don’t have to cover them with a finger (like the ones on the 5’s steering-wheel spokes), then look at a screen elsewhere before you’ve confidently identified the function of what you’re preparing to press.
A car’s central infotainment screen should, in our view, also have fewer responsibilities to juggle than the 14.5in, portrait-orientated one here. It should also carry less driver-relevant information, which might otherwise be relayed in a way that draws your attention less far from the road, and generally be more responsive and less distracting (see Multimedia section).
Its particular digital take on usability notwithstanding, the 5’s interior is a very pleasant, inviting and judiciously lavish place. It isn’t flashy or chintzy and avoids traditional luxury material tropes, yet it still puts tactile, expensive-feeling materials – many of them recycled – in just the right places.
The full-length glass roof will loom close to the scalps of taller passengers in the back (although the seatbacks have electric recline adjustment to mitigate that problem), but it does bathe the cabin in lots of natural light and makes travelling in the back every bit as special as in the front.
The boot, meanwhile, is a little shallow for a GT of this size but still big enough for plenty of luggage, and it can be expanded via folding the rear seats forward.
Multimedia – 3 stars
The 5’s big, upright infotainment touchscreen is in essence the same as you will find in Polestar’s 3 SUV. The firm has been refining its layout and software for several years now, and you do notice the benefit.
The lower half of the screen, which typically displays controls and trip computer information, is now more configurable, making your route to certain parts of the wider menu system (for headlight control, mirror adjustment or ADAS, for instance) shorter than it might be. It manages better, in other words, with having clearly been given too much to do in the first place.
Even so, it can be a little unresponsive, seeming too often to need two prods of your fingertip when one ought to do. It also has the unhappy habit of displaying alert messages over the upper menu navigation bar, forcing you to pause while the message clears before you can continue to what you’re looking for.
Mirroring for both Apple and Android smartphones is standard and worked well for our testers. And the 21-speaker premium audio system from Bowers and Wilkins impressed us with both its power and definition.
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